Strange cash flow problem I hope someone can explain

[troche58]

I'm fairly new to this game but this is probably the 4th attempt to get a game going. What I'm observing in this game that I haven't observed in the other games is the way my cash on hand fluctuates. I have a positive cash flow of about 10K and I see my balance going up for a few days and then about every 10 days or so it drops by 5K. I have all my spending (ships, bases, troops, gifts, etc) set to manual. What is eating up my money? Could it be tribute? I don't think it would be because I see the amount my income goes down every 10ish days vary and sometimes more than 5K. Also, the tribute amount is already deducted from what makes up my cash flow.

Maybe better question is how can I get my economy going? I'm playing as Humans and have a bunch of resort bases and commerce level 2 and 3 friendly neighbors with trade agreements. In prior games I didn't seem to have issue with income but in this game the main diff is I'm building more ships. But again, the maint on ships is already taken out in the free cash flow equation so don't understand how my balance drops every 10 days or so

[fruitgnome]

Maybe auto updating of ships and bases to latest design. Upload save and I will see.

[100thMonkey]

Maybe better question is how can I get my economy going? I'm playing as Humans and have a bunch of resort bases and commerce level 2 and 3 friendly neighbors with trade agreements

I haven't played all races, so the following might not always be true (for instance, with Teekans), but as a general rule, the main source of revenues are your colonies, their populations and their development.

So exploration is a high priority (numbers of exploration ships AND exploration techs), to be able to locate potential colonies before others do. And it also allows you to locate sources of luxury resources which increases your colonies' development (of course, construction resources and caslon are also a priority).

Colonization techs for the different planet types not only make more planets appropriate for colonization (by lowering the quality threshold required for a planet to be a worthwhile candidate for colonization), but it also increases revenues from your existing colonies of the same type.

And terraform your big colonies as soon as you can afford it (you need the "Improved Colonization" tech to be able to do so).

The planetary administration facilities are important to reduce corruption, especially on your big colonies (available through the "Planetary Governance" tech line).

Some techs allow to reduce your costs. Among them:

- "Advanced Construction" tech line (reduce ship maintenance)
- "Improved Logistics" tech line (reduce troop maintenance).

If you haven't done so yet, I would suggest that you take a look to Nightskies' guide "Resource Logistics and Economy: for Space Orcs" on Steam (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2948376176.

Hope that helps.

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Luxuries? Stockpile levels on those are often set fairly low, so it's quite possible to run out before freighters finally manage to bring in more. And if you rely on mining ships - running out is pretty much the norm.

[100thMonkey]

Luxuries? Stockpile levels on those are often set fairly low, so it's quite possible to run out before freighters finally manage to bring in more. And if you rely on mining ships - running out is pretty much the norm.

But that doesn't change the fact that luxury resources are necessary to increase your colonies development, which in turn results in more revenues.

So the question then becomes: how do I get more luxury resources?

Of course, their scarcity depends on the settings used in setting up the game. But finding more sources of luxury resources will always help. So exploration IS a priority.

Improving parts of your industrial infrastructure also helps. This is mainly done through research. Specific things to improve include:

- mining rates
- cargo throughput
- cargo capacity
- bigger hulls for mining stations and freighters
- faster hyperspace engines.

[hurkle]

I'm fairly new to this game but this is probably the 4th attempt to get a game going. What I'm observing in this game that I haven't observed in the other games is the way my cash on hand fluctuates. I have a positive cash flow of about 10K and I see my balance going up for a few days and then about every 10 days or so it drops by 5K. I have all my spending (ships, bases, troops, gifts, etc) set to manual. What is eating up my money? Could it be tribute? I don't think it would be because I see the amount my income goes down every 10ish days vary and sometimes more than 5K. Also, the tribute amount is already deducted from what makes up my cash flow.

This sounds like it is working as it should be and does not sound like anything is broken here.

Income and expenditure dont happen at the same time so your balance can bounce around with each 'tick' of income and expenditure.

You have a number of daily expenses (maintenance, growth, research are static costs; building and recruitment would be under your control) and you have daily incomes (almost totally colony tax income), the difference between these for you is 10k per year and it sounds like you have incomes of just over 190k and outgoings of just over 180k per year based on what you wrote.

Have a look at the empires economy tab where you can see the assorted amounts coming in and going out. This tells you all you need to know.

With 10k 'positive cash flow' you will be very slowly going up by close to 30 a day or about 835 a month on average.

To put it another way, and based on what you have written,your base income is about 5300 per 10 days and base outgoings are about 5000 per ten days, your profit is about 280 per 10 days. Your yearly profit is roughly 28 per day times 365 days which is around 10k per year. You are going to have periods where bigger costs put you well below where you expect and periods where bigger income puts you above expected, this is just the way the game is.

All of this does not count bonus income which can be variable amounts and can be significantly more than your 'positive cash flow' per year.